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With a start date set for
Hello, Dolly!
the Studio was now turning its attention to other roadshow possibilities. One was a dramatization of Stephen Vincent Benét’s poem,
John Brown’s Body
. The project had been assigned to producer Pandro S. Berman, who had hired playwright Paul Osborne to do the screenplay. A few days after the first draft of the screenplay was completed, Berman and Osborne were summoned to Richard Zanuck’s office to get his reaction.

“Well, Richard, I’m very excited,” Berman said. “I think we have an Academy Award winning picture here.”

Zanuck cleared his throat. “I’m excited, too, Pandro,” he said. He nodded toward Osborne. “I wish all first drafts were this good.” There was a speck of cigarette ash on his desk and he carefully swept it into a wastebasket. “There’s just one thing. I think we depend too much on narration, you know, on the words of the poem. I wonder if this could be dangerous. I thought I spotted a number of places where action could tell the story instead of narration.”

Berman shifted easily in his chair. “As a matter of fact, Richard, I’ve been cutting the script, cutting what my wife calls the Mickey Mouse action, and the things I’ve been cutting are just what you’ve been talking about, the narration.”

“It shouldn’t be used as a crutch,” Zanuck said.

“That’s right, Richard,” Berman said. “Where the narrator speaks for Lincoln, we can use Lincoln to speak for himself.”

“Use scenes instead of narration,” Zanuck said.

“My feeling, exactly, Richard,” Berman said. “And I’m sure it’s Paul’s.”

Osborne’s face showed no expression.

“Let the characters tell the story instead of the goddamn narration, great and beautiful as it is,” Zanuck said.

“Keep the poetry but go deeper with the people,” Berman said. “So the first order of business in the second draft is to translate the narration into scenes.” He turned to Osborne. “Did you get that, Paul?”

Osborne nodded.

“Now I thought the love story is a little shallow,” Zanuck said.

“You want some complications,” Berman said.

“That’s right,” Zanuck said. “I want to get deeper into the story. Maybe it can do with a little spice.”

Berman smiled thoughtfully. “If I may suggest it, Paul,” he said to Osborne, “I think we can give Richard what he’s looking for, the sexy angle, by having Clay sleep with Sally.” He turned to Zanuck. “Isn’t that right, Richard?”

“Right,” Zanuck said.

“Now it may be too early,” Berman said, “but I’ve got some ideas for casting.”

“It’s never too early,” Zanuck said.

“Well, I’d like to draw on my old relation with Sidney Poitier to play Spade,” Berman said.

“Isn’t he a little genteel?” Osborne said.

“Not really, Paul,” Berman said. “I had him playing a Mau Mau in
Something of Value
.”

“Ah,” Osborne said.

“And I think Lincoln is a hell of a part,” Berman said.

“I agree, Pandro, I agree,” Zanuck said. He fingered the script and cleared his throat again. “There’s one small point about Lincoln, though. Do you think it might be too obvious to have someone say to him, ‘Are you going to the theater tonight?’ ”

“I see your point, Richard,” Berman said smoothly. “And I think we can cut that. Can’t we, Paul?”

Late in October,
Star!
was in the final stages of shooting. All the non-musical portions of the picture had been completed and the company had shut down to rehearse the musical production numbers that remained to be shot. Daniel Massey, the young English actor who played Noel Coward in the film, had finished all his scenes but lingered in Los Angeles to loop some dialogue.
The day before he was scheduled to return to London, Massey spent the whole morning and afternoon in the looping room in the basement of the Studio Theater. “Looping” means dubbing, and is necessitated by extraneous background noises picked up during filming, the desire to get a different inflection in the actor’s voice, or simply because a long shot precluded the use of a microphone. It is a tedious process and is so called because the loop of film showing the scene to be dubbed is run round and round through the projector and flashed on the screen in the front of the room. The actor must watch his image and synchronize his words precisely to the movement of his lips on the screen.

The dubbing room was furnished in what looked like Salvation Army rejects—old chairs and a moth-eaten settee. A microphone was set up and marks put on the floor showing Massey the limits he could move forward or back to adjust his vocal volume. Massey dropped into a chair, puffing nervously on a cigarette. For the first time, he was having some doubts about his portrayal of Coward. “I’m going to be pilloried,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it. People are going to say I’m just imitating Noel. I’m not, you know. He talks all up here”—he waved his hands up by his temple and talked as if he had a head cold—“not down here.” He patted his stomach. “I could imitate him, of course. But that’s going the Frank Gorshin route. That’s all right for night clubs, but I’m not a mimic.”

A voice from the control booth announced that the new loop was ready. The scene was after the opening of Gertrude Lawrence’s first Broadway show and Massey, as Coward, was reading the reviews. It had been shot on
location at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, but background noises had made necessary a new reading of his line: “ ‘Jack Buchanan, a young Englishman of astonishing grace and charm.’ ” Massey slipped to the microphone and listened to the original sound track to get the proper inflection of his voice. He signaled that he was ready and the loop was played without the sound.

“ ‘Jack Buchanan, a young Englishman of astonishing grace and charm,’ ” Massey said. He bit each word out.

“You were late with ‘a young Englishman,’ ” the sound man said.

Massey repeated the line.

“A little rubbery,” the sound man said.

Again and again, Massey repeated the words. He rolled his “r’s” and cut off the word “charm” so sharply it sounded like “charmp.”

Finally the sound man was satisfied. Massey listened to the playback. “Okay, I’ll buy it,” he said. He flopped back into his chair. “Pilloried,” he said. He lit another cigarette from the butt of the first. “What’s the next loop?”

“ ‘What price Clapham now?’ ” the sound man said.

“My God, there must be an easier way,” Massey said.

A few days later, after two weeks of rehearsal, director Robert Wise was ready to shoot the “Jenny” number in
Star!
“Jenny” was a Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin song sung by Gertrude Lawrence in Moss Hart’s
Lady in the Dark
, a Broadway hit in the early 1940’s. Though it would last only three or four minutes on screen, the number would take two weeks to shoot. A musical production
number is enormously complicated to film. All movements must be keyed to a musical count. How, where and at what pace dancers and principals walk, jog or leap is determined by the beat. Careful measurements must be made of the distances to be covered in a particular shot in order for action and camera movement to synchronize with the music. The stage directions in the script gave only a slight indication of the difficulties involved:

All the musical numbers for
Star!
were choreographed by Michael Kidd, the Broadway dancer and director who was working on his first film in over ten years. A slim, dark-haired man with a nervous athletic grace, Kidd sucked on a cigarette as he moved the chorus back and forth on the stage. Off to the side, Robert Wise sat quietly in a director’s chair watching Kidd position the dancers. Kidd bounced back and forth between the facsimile stage and the camera crane where he checked angles with
Star!
’s cinematographer, Ernest Laszlo. The master shot—a shot showing the entire number, taking in all the performers onstage—had already been filmed, and now Kidd was lining up individual movements and closeups. The male dancers were wearing circus costume and dead-white facial makeup offset with ruby rouge spots; the women wore spangled tights. Onstage, Kidd’s assistant, a dancer named Sheila Hackett, was standing in for Julie Andrews, practicing a leap from a platform into a male dancer’s arms. She did the leap several times as Kidd peered through the huge 70mm camera to make sure that it caught the entire movement.

Wise climbed up on the crane and took a look through the camera. “It’s a bit vacant in the background,” he said to Kidd. “We’re going to pick up a big hole there. You’d better put some more dancers back there, Mike.”

Kidd called for some additional dancers, and when
he was finally satisfied, he ordered a break for the chorus to touch up their makeup. Julie Andrews was still in her dressing room. Finally Wise told Reggie Callow, his assistant director, to have the chorus take their places. As one of the male dancers in clown costume passed him, Wise touched his arm. “You’re wearing a watch,” he said gently. “Clowns don’t wear watches. It shows up on film.”

“I forgot,” the dancer said.

“I’ll hold it,” Wise said. He took the watch and put it in his pocket.

Julie Andrews emerged from her dressing room as Callow bellowed over a bullhorn for the dancers to take their positions.

“You better sit over here, dear,” Wise said to Julie Andrews. “We’ll run it through once more so you can see what we’re doing.”

The camera dollied in for a rehearsal. Onstage, Sheila Hackett waited for the musical playback to begin and on cue leaped from the platform into the dancer’s arms.

“We need some more acrobats,” Kidd said. “We’ve still got a hole back there.”

“You told me you didn’t need any more,” Callow said. His beefy red face was rimmed with sweat.

“We only need their legs,” Kidd said. “We’re only going to pick them up from the waist down. They don’t have to wear their tops. Only the bottoms.”

There was a momentary delay until the dancer-acrobats took their places. Once more, Sheila Hackett did a runthrough.

“I’ve got it now,” Julie Andrews said. She peeled off her bathrobe and took her position on the stage, wearing
a form-fitting black sequined outfit. With Kidd chanting the beat over a bullhorn, she did a practice leap from the platform. The dancer did not catch her just right and she repeated the jump a half dozen more times until the timing was perfected. At last Wise called for a picture. The set went silent and then the prerecorded music for the number blasted through the stage. Mouthing the words of “Jenny,” Julie Andrews leaped from the platform.

Again the dancer did not catch her right, and the shot was repeated. This time Julie Andrews’ leap was too high. On the third take she muffed the lyric and on the fourth the dancer once more did not catch her properly. Wise called for another take and then still another. Beads of sweat began to ring Julie Andrews’ forehead. After each take a makeup man powdered her face.

The morning wore on. Nearly an hour and a half passed before Wise got the shot he thought he wanted. Then the camera operator said a few words to him.

“Your foot was out of the frame, dear,” Robert Wise said then. “Let’s do it again.”

The company broke for lunch at twelve-thirty. They were supposed to return in an hour, but Julie Andrews had a costume fitting and did not reappear on the set until nearly three o’clock. His elaborate paunch spreading out like a table from under his shirt, Reggie Callow sat in Wise’s chair, surrounded by members of the crew.

“You remember Steve Cochran?” Callow said. “Just died a while back. Well, he was the best I ever saw at promoting stuff. A lot of actors, you know, they like to smoke in a scene. But Cochran, he had a piece of business he liked to use, it was the best I ever saw. He liked
to
open
a pack of cigarettes. That way, every take you had to give him a fresh pack. I remember one picture, he did nineteen takes of a scene one day, and that night he went home with nineteen packs of cigarettes with just one butt out of each package. That’s almost two cartons. Oh, he was something, really something.”